I find this photograph to be curious to the extreme, to the point of being suspicious in fact.

What the Times gives us here in this possibly subliminal photo is a roomful of diverse people(s) celebrating the post-racial victory of George Zimmerman's take-down.

But here's where my COTT bullshit alarms start dinging loudly: the photo contains an almost anthropology department profile-shot of a typical white dude, next to an equally clear profile-shot of a black woman, who because she is in traditional African attire, leads the reader to further assume that she is likely 100% black (unlike only 83% black for most African Americans, who have 17% European racial admixture on average).

If the New York Times is always working so hard to downplay the significance of inherent racial differences - especially God forbid in biology - why then would they give us a photograph worthy of a race realism primer straight out of late-19th century America?

4 comments:

There's another explanation for this photo, which you might have overlooked:

It could be that the editors at the Time are totally unaware of the comparative skull charts of Samuel Morton, and that the younger ones there totally believe in the whole race as a social construct thing, and thus would not even notice the difference in the skull shapes of the black lady and the bearded white guy, nor would they assign those differences any importance.

Rather, what might be happening in this photo, is that the Times wanted to present it as a "teachable moment" where the races all come together: notice that the african lady is looking at the screen, while the white guy is looking at the african lady.

Has anyone else seen that video on youtube, where a man is given a pair of special glasses that enables him to see subliminal messages in all sorts of different places. Reading my first HBO article on the interweb out of pure curiosity was a bit like putting on a pair of these special glasses, and seeing the world as it really is for the very first time.